Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/339

Rh remembers nothing of this is no decisive objection against this consideration. My patients, for example, who at the beginning of the analysis declared that they had usually no dreams, gradually accustomed themselves by continual weakening of the inner psychic resistance against the censorship to remember all their dreams. But if in the course of the analysis one strikes a very resistant, pain-toned complex, dreams apparently cease naturally they are only forgotten, repressed, because of their unpleasant content.

The obvious objection, that these dream observations and analyses have been carried on for the most part on neurotic and so abnormal persons, and that conclusions should not be drawn as to the dreams of healthy people, does not need to be refuted by the reply that mental health and psychoneuroses only differ in a quantitative way; it can also be answered that the analyses of people mentally normal fully agree with the interpretation of dreams of neurotics. The communication of the analysis of one's own dreams, however, meets with almost insurmountable difficulties. Freud has not shrunk from this sacrifice the exposure of intimate personal matters in his "Traumdeutung," even though regard for others make unavoidable gaps here and there in his analyses. Similar considerations made it necessary for me to explain the art of the interpretation of dreams not from my own dreams, but from those of my patients. For the rest, the practise of selfanalysis is indispensable for any one who desires to penetrate into the unconscious processes of dream-life.

The neurotic persons whose dreams I have brought forward here and there as examples also pave the way for me to say a few words about the pathological and therapeutic significance of dreams and their interpretation. We saw how greatly the analysis of a neurotic may be accelerated by a successful dream analysis. The dream censorship, which is only half awake, often allows to penetrate to the dream consciousness thought-complexes, which in waking life could not be brought to consciousness by free association. There also lead out from the dream elements immediate and shorter ways to the repressed pathogenic material, that is, to the source of the neurotic symptoms. The becoming conscious of such complexes can be regarded as a step toward the cure.

Then, too, the diagnostic significance of dreams must not escape us, and in a time which is not too distant there ought to arise besides the physiological, also a pathological dream psychology, which should treat systematically of the peculiarities of dreams with hystericals, those suffering from imperative neuroses, paranoiacs, dementia prsecox patients, sufferers from neurasthenia, from the anxiety-neurosis, alcoholism,